room.
Barbara wasn't completely surprised at the coincidence of being at the same hotel as Hadiyyah and Taymullah Azhar. She'd expected to find them staying with the Malik family, but as that apparently had not been possible, then the Burnt House Hotel was a logical choice. Haytham Querashi had stayed here, after all, and Azhar was in Balford because of Querashi.
"Ah. Sergeant Havers." Barbara swung round to see Basil Treves behind her, two plates of breakfast in his hand. He beamed at her. "If you'll allow me to show you to your table .
. . ?"
As he attempted to shimmy past her to do the honours, Hadiyyah gave a happy shout.
"Barbara!
You came!" And she dropped her spoon into her cereal, splashing milk across the pink tablecloth.
She popped out of her chair and did her usual hop-and-skip across the room, singing,
"You came! You came! You came to the seaside!" with her yellow ribboned plaits dancing round her shoulders. She was dressed like sunshine: yellow shorts and striped T-shirt, yellow banded socks and sandals. She gripped Barbara's hand. "Have you come to build a sand castle with me? Have you come to pick cockles? I want to play the penny slide and ride the dodge'm cars as well.
Do you?"
Basil Treves was watching this interaction with some consternation. He said with more meaning,
"If I may show you to your table, Sergeant Havers," and nodded pointedly at a table next to an open window and decidedly among the English residents.
"I'd rather be over there," Barbara told him, jerking her thumb in the direction of the Pakistanis' dark corner. "Too much fresh air in the morning puts me right off my kippers.
D'you mind?"
Without waiting for him to reply, she sauntered over to Azhar. Hadiyyah skipped ahead.
She cried out, "She's here! Look, Dad! She's here! She's here!" and didn't appear to notice that her father was greeting Barbara's arrival with that special joy one generally reserves for embracing lepers.
Basil Treves, in the meantime, had deposited the two breakfast plates in front of Mrs.
Porter and her companion. He hurried over to usher Barbara into a seat at the table next to Azhar's.
He was saying, "Yes, oh yes. Of course. And will it be orange juice, Sergeant Havers?
What about grapefruit?" He whipped the napkin out of its teepee folds with a flourish that suggested having the sergeant sit among the darkies had always been part of his master plan.
"No, with us! With us!" Hadiyyah crowed. She tugged Barbara to their table, saying, "It's okay, Dad, isn't it? She must sit with us."
Azhar observed Barbara evenly with his unreadable brown eyes. The only indication of feeling that he gave was the deliberate hesitation he employed before getting to his feet in greeting.
"We'd be very pleased, Barbara," he said formally.
Bollocks, Barbara thought. But she said, "If you've room . . . ?"
"Can make room. Can do," Basil Treves said.
And as he moved cutlery and crockery from her table to Azhar's, he hummed with the fierce determination employed by a man making the best of a bad situation.
"I'm so happy, happy, happy!" Hadiyyah sang.
"You've come for your holiday, haven't you? We can go to the beach. We can look for shells. We can go fishing. We can play on the pier." She climbed back onto her chair and retrieved her spoon from the middle of her cereal, where it lay like a silver exclamation mark, commenting on the morning's proceedings. Hadiyyah scooped it up, oblivious of the milk that dripped from it onto the front of her striped T-shirt.
"Yesterday Mrs. Porter looked after me while Dad did some business," she confided to Barbara.
"We read a book about fossils on the lawn.
I mean," she giggled, "we read on the lawn.
Today we were s'posed to take a walk along the Cliff Parade, but it's way too far to walk all the way to the pier. Too far for Mrs. Porter, that is. But / c'n walk that far, can't I? And now that you're here, Dad will let me go to the arcade.
Won't you, Dad? Won't you let me go if Barbara comes with me?" She squirmed in her chair so that she faced Barbara. "We c'n ride the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel, Barbara. We c'n shoot in the shooting gallery. We can play the crane grab. Are you good at the crane grab? Dad is brilliant. He grabbed me a koala bear once, and once he grabbed Mummy a pink - "
"Hadiyyah." Her father's voice was firm. It silenced her with